Frankly Speaking

Garry Begg of the NDP is now ahead by 27 votes in Surrey-Guildford. A judicial recount will take place next week. If  that result holds, the NDP will have a majority government by the slimmest of margins. Surrey voters played a pivotal role in the Oct. 19 provincial election, as foreshadowed by the frequent visits of NDP leader David Eby and Conservative leader John Rustad to Surrey during the campaign.  The drama continued for another 10 days until Monday, Oct. 28, when final results were announced after recounts and counting of absentee ballots. In one Surrey seat, Surrey-Guildford, winning candidate Garry Begg of the NDP has a 27-vote margin of victory over Conservative Honveer Singh Randhawa. A judicial recount will take place next week to make the final determination. One is also scheduled to take place in Kelowna Centre, where Conservative Kristina Loewen is 38 votes ahead of Loyal Wooldridge of the NDP. For now, the NDP have the slimmest of majorities in the B.C. Legisl...

Santa Claus has a bag full of goodies for the newsmakers among us. This is an update of a sneak preview of gifts Santa has for some of the newsmakers who affect our lives. The original was written in the midst of the windstorm of Dec. 20, just before the power went out at my home and in thousands of other places on or near the B.C. south coast. Of course, that was the day the White Rock pier broke apart in the storm, and the day the electoral reform referendum results came down. As a result of all that, Santa let me know that an update of the gifts he was giving was required. Over a bowl of Christmas cheer, I acquiesced. Santa had to change his list quite dramatically this year – even as late as Thursday, Dec. 20. So many of the politicians he had gifts for were summarily dumped by voters in October, and that didn’t give the elves in his workshop much time to retool. However, he’s managed to do his best with the time he had available. He knew earlier that Linda Hepner ...

Attorney-General David Eby is setting the table for some significant changes at the Insurance Corporation of B.C. It is important to remember that ICBC has been a highly-political Crown corporation, used by all political parties for their own purposes, since it took over the car insurance market in 1974. The Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) is in crisis. ICBC is set to lose $1.3 billion in the current fiscal year, and once again it is the subject of intense political gamesmanship. On Monday, Attorney General David Eby called a press conference to officially confirm the deficit. He pledged a number of measures to try and ease the bleeding. At the same time, he said the former BC Liberal government left ICBC as a “blazing dumpster fire” by ignoring its problems, and even changing an independent report commissioned in 2014 which examined ICBC’s financial issues. “They knew the dumpster was on fire, but they pushed it behind the building instead of trying to put the fire o...

Premier Christy Clark announced on July 25 that a 15 per cent property purchase tax will be applied to all residential property purchases by foreigners, including trusts and corporations. About six months ago, I received a call from a polling firm which was clearly working for the BC Liberals. The caller asked a number of very specific questions, and one was what issues I was most concerned about. The first thing I mentioned was the high cost of housing, and how soaring real estate prices have a devastating effect on people who are not in the marketplace. That includes people who want to buy, people moving into the area from elsewhere and renters. At that time, the provincial government had done absolutely nothing on that particular file, and in fact was all but asking investors to bring their money to B.C. and keep the real estate boom going. Not long after that call, The Globe and Mail published several crucial stories about what was actually happening in the real estate mar...